I am using this letter on my internet web pages as a way to express my deepest
feelings on the subject of Mental Health.

As a graduate of a masters program in spiritual psychology I am familiar
with the Neuro Linguistics Progranning [NLP] concept of reframing.
Reframing is just a new way of looking at anything. I believe
that we can ease the stigma of mental illness if we reframe mental illness
as a path of heroes recovering from acting like victims. I hope that
you will take this small leap of faith with me, and find that it feels
comfortable for you. My thesis is that our mentally ill could begin
to be treated as part of our heroes taking on part of our wounds. Heroic
therapist are the ones helping all of us heal our wounds.

Mental Health and Homelessness

These subjects are close to my heart because I have recovered from what was
diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenia disorders in the past. I have
recovered to where I have earned a masters degree in psychology and am assisting
other therapist and others. I have also assisted some homeless in their
recovery process. From my experiences I have learned a unique perspective
on how mental illeness can be described. From my perspective I can
see what some of the possible solutions are. Perhaps you may find some
of my information of some use in what ever your role is in our world.
Perhaps you can use some of my information to remove some of the stigma
of mental illness.

Who am I?

I am a retired federal civil servant enjoying my new career as one who fosters
recovery for therapist, teams, and troopers that choose to recover. I
spent most of my past career as a civilian project team leader for the Navy
and as a systems engineer. I was grateful for my federal sick leave
and my Blue Cross High Option when I was diagnosed as manic depressive in
1982. I needed my sick leave to use for my time to recover. I
also needed my health insurance, more to pacify my wife that did not know
how to cope with my illness. There was one short time that I really
needed some medicine. I would have asked for more assistance, if the
surrounding attitudes had been more positive and open. My
wife's attitudes and the attitudes of those that supported her came
from society. A change in attitudes is at the heart of my thesis here.

I knew that I had wanted to make my world a better place to live. I
knew that I was sick and tired of my problems and that I had chosen to resolve
my issues and that this had triggered my illness. I knew that what
was happening was part of my recovery. I knew I had to cooperate with
my recovery processes, in spite of the attitudes of my family, therapists,
and hospital. They did not know any better, but I did.

Why do I want to reduce the stigma of mental illness? Because it will
assist in the healing of my friends that are temporarily mentally ill.
Because it will assist in the healing of my other friends that are temporarily
judgmental of mental illness. Because it will make the job of the heroic
therapist easier.

How do I know that reducing the stigma of mental illness will be healing?
I know from what happened to me. I got through my illness faster
by cooperating with my terrors, my fears, my low and high energies for seven
years. I facilitated my healing by forgiving my judgments on others
and myself. I found that the intention of my terrors, fears, and energy
levels was to heal me. I would have healed even faster if my family,
friends, professionals, and society had been supportive of my healing processes
and if I knew what I know now.

I believe our mentally ill are some of our heroes. Why? Because
I see them as taking on a larger share of our madness and hurts because of
their perceived diminished state. I see them as heroes because most
of them are hurting themselves instead of us.

I will take each of these points separately. How are they taking a
larger share of our madness and hurts?

We get some clues from the experiences of therapist that have seen how families
interrelate. What they have seen is that when their client get better
and return to their family system, new things happens. Their client
returns to mental illness or someone else in the family system gets ill or
they all get better. They are all showing how they are all interrelated.
A branch of therapy called family systems therapy knows this from their
experiences. The mentally ill are in a family system and a community
system and a country system and a world system. I believe that our
mentally ill are only our identified mad. I believe that the real madnesses
are in our world and our country and our communities and our families. I
believe that our mentally ill are the ones with the least resistance and
most sensitivity to our system madness.

I believe that our mentally ill are our brave ones that have somehow decided
to take on a larger share of our community illness. It might be from
a messiah complex, but Messiahs are heroes. I know that in my case,
when I had hit bottom, I decided to help save the world by becoming enlightened.
What happened was that my fears came upon me and I got through my trials
of Job with my attitude and my training as a US Marine and as a scientist.
On the other side of that "mine field", I found that I had only saved
myself by going through a rebirth process. Now I needed to grow up
again. Therapist have seen how some family members decide to take on
their family's problems by doing the acting out for the family. Their
mental illness may not always go back to conscious decisions like mine.
They may be in their nightmare, on a quest that they fell into without
knowing how they decided to do that.

We call our veterans heroes, and many only fell into that nightmares of the
madness of war without knowing how they did that.

How are the mentally ill hurting themselves instead of us? Simple.
I believe that criminals are just mentally mad people that have decided
to hurt others as well as themselves. For me, heroes are mentally ill
people that have decided to just hurt themselves. That makes them my
heroes. Criminals are a different subject and if you are interested on how
as many as 80% on the next generation could lead good lives instead of jail
lives, write.

The Story of the Indian Holy Man

I have heard about an Indian mystic, I believe his name was Mehr Baba. He
would go to the local insane asylum from time to time and just sit and commune
with the inmates. From time to time inmates some would become more
rational and would leave to lead better lives. Part of the solution
is to facilitate the visiting of inmates. In my experience, jails let
in more visitors than mental hospitals. Some places only allow family.
We could be their true friends that celebrate the part they are taking
on for us all. A friend of mine once said he is in the least of us
so why not make it easier to visit him there.

My Friends the Homeless

I met several homeless that were begging outside my place of employment.
I would talk to them and became friends with several of them. The
ones that chose to get better began to get better. The ones that were too
mad and did not want to choose to get better stopped coming around. When
I first met one of them, he was most of the time cursing and spitting on
the ground and was telling about his demons. Over time his demons and
cursing and spitting went away. Then he got SSI assistance and got
a small place to live. He recently showed me pictures of his place
where he had his cat and had decorated his small place very nicely. I
celebrate his partial recovery and his continuing recovery. I celebrate
his transformation of his deamons in our collective unconscious.

A Story of American Mental Hospitals

This true story was written up in "Science" quite a while ago. We forget
what we discover many times. Several young doctors wanted to see how
they would be treated in mental hospitals. They went to several separate
hospitals and described the same symptom. They said they heard a "thud"
sound. They were all hospitalized as mentally ill. They then
acted rationally in the hospitals.

The Hospital Doctors and Staff all treated them as mentally ill, even though
they said they were not. The strange thing is that the Doctors and
the Staff never caught on; but the "mentally ill" patients did catch on.
The "mentally ill" could tell that the young doctors were rational.
Those young doctors were our forgotten heroes. The keepers of
our mental instutions may still be in denial, even though they are trying
to be our heroes. I believe that it would be effective to have a
qualification requirement for doctors and staff to have to spend two weeks
a year as an identified patient in other similar institutions. With
this new perspective our heroic therapist would tend to have even more empathic
skills. I suspect that the mental health system would begin to recover
from its illnesses, much more rapidly.

The Story of the Mad Mother

I once gave a talk on how I had recovered from my mental illness.
Afterwards an overbearing mother told me this story. She had
a child that she thought was psychic. The child seemed to know what
she was going to do and it frightened her. She had the child put in
a mental hospital to relieve her fears. It may have also been a blessing
in disguise for the child to be away from this particular mother. This
way her child was a hero that took on an extra share of her family's angers
without having to face the angry mother daily.

The Story of the Heroic Schizophrenics and their
Therapist

This is a true story that was told to me by a friend that was a therapist
in a public mental hospital. She was put in charge of a group of
schizophrenics. She was frustrated and wanted to help. Her intuition
told her to do a strange thing. She threw off her clothes and ran out
into the courtyard and into a wading pool. Her schizophrenic charges
followed her and threw off their clothes and began frolicking in the pool.
She then noticed a strange thing. All her schizophrenic patients
had become more rational. Their strange symptoms went away. They
were all telling her this strange story. They all told her that they
had chosen to come to earth to help make earth a better place to live.
They all told her the they found it a lot harder to help than they
had expected.

Of course society fired her and took no note that playfulness and non
judgmentalness had a dramatic effect on reducing their symptoms and made
their role as secret heroes OK. She is a hero to me because of her
courage to follow her intuition and to discover a unique perspective towards
skitzphrenics. I note that mystics say that they are part of all of
us. It looks to me that schizophrenics have part of that mystic experience,
but they can not contain their mystical experience rationally. I would
like to see research on my heroic friend's discoveries. Perhaps we
could bring more of our schizophrenic veterans home. In earlier times before
we designated people as mentally ill, the same symptoms made them the valued
people in a community. Their value was that they exhibited signs of being
closer to the spirit world. See
enclosure
[3] for more data on this reframe of perspective.

The Real Problem and Some Solutions

I have suggested all along that the REAL problem is one of our society's
attitudes from ignorance. Society's attitudes causes society to be
mad because they expect others to meet their expectations. Their
expectations are seldom meeting reality. Our society's attitudes can
be influenced by small changes. Our leadership is in the best position
to begin these changes. It could cost a less than we are spending and
would save a lot in the future.

For example, our government required a simple statement of truth on cigarette
packages. Then they began to have some anti smoking advertisements. This
set in motion a long term revolution in our attitudes towards smoking. Now
smokers are more considerate of non smokers whether they want to or not.
More smokers now know the games that the cigarette companies are playing
on them. Cigarette companies are now rapidly developing safer smokes
and are on the defensive.

How about our government requiring a simple statement of truth at the entrance
to our mental institutions and the doors of therapist. "Here enter
the heroes of our society that have taken a larger share of our society's
wounds."

How about incentivizing doctors and staff of mental institutions to spend
two weeks each year in an equivalent institution as an identified patient
referred there by a professional. This could be used to meet their
continuing education requirements. Counselors and Social Workers could be
incentivized to go to Al Anon or other equivalent co-dependent recovery groups
for part of their continuing education.

It would also be helpful to have the private sector have the same sick leave
policy as the federal government. Being able to save my sick leave
was a life saver for my family. Even so, I still had over half a year left
when I retired.

Managed care in the long run may begin to find and fund things that work
to heal mental illness because in the long run it would cost them less money.
I went to a presentation about a short teaching program for recovery
of depressed women that ended up saving 75% on their medical health plans.
There are more discoveries out there like this. Changing the
stigma of mental illness to respect will reduce the amount of people that
are turning their mental anguish into physical disease and hypochondria.
Since these are the people that are the high utilizers of our medical
systems, there will be great cost savings. Changing the stigma of
mental illness to respect will facilitate more rapid recovery and provide
a great cost savings. How else will we manage to aford the baby boomers
without these more enlightened approaches.

I have read about a technique of leaving some mentally ill alone in the woods
with enough food and checking on them each month until they work through
their illness. I have read about a country where they have villages
that have a tradition of leaving each of their mentally ill in separate healthy
families. These seems like better ideas to me than concentrating our
illnesses in hospitals. I believe research on how well these and other
techniques work would be in order.

Any or all or more like changes would start a revolutionary change for all
of us.